The M+G+R Foundation

The Vatican Spokesman - Dr.
Joaquín Navarro-Valls

According to Himself

Original Full Article (1)

By
J. Tagliabue

ROME - "These cardinals," said
Joaquín Navarro-Valls with mock chagrin as he swept a visitor
into his office just off St. Peter's Square. "They come by without any
appointment. You cannot say no. So it's, `Yes, your eminence, just have
a seat.' "

Nineteen years into his career as papal
spokesman, Dr. Navarro-Valls, now 65, still has occasional headaches
with the centuries-old papal bureaucracy, the Roman Curia.

Last year, when the Curia decided to
alter the norms for reporting sexual abuse committed by priests, it
neatly buried the change in a document distributed without publicity,
under a cover letter in Latin.

The norms did not become generally known
until a reporter for the Catholic News Service stumbled across them in
a conversation with a bishop.

Why do things like this still happen?

Dr. Navarro-Valls winced.

"The Roman Curia is, historically, a very
old organization," he said. "We are talking in terms of centuries. Its
formal organization goes back to Sixtus V." Sixtus was a 16th-century
pontiff known as the "iron pope," for creating the curial machinery
essentially to crush the influence of cardinals and bishops.

The subject of sexual abuse by priests
has been especially sensitive for Dr. Navarro-Valls since March, when
in an interview he linked the problem to homosexuality and was quoted
questioning whether the ordination of gays was valid.

As to how Pope John Paul II and the
Vatican will react to the zero-tolerance approach to abusive priests
adopted by the American bishops in Dallas, he stopped, suddenly
tentative. "I am not a technician in canon law," he said, "but I think
the main concern will be to reconcile the decisions approved in the
United States with practices in other countries, to try to harmonize
these decisions with the general canon law for the whole church, to try
to see where there may be contradictions."

Dr. Navarro-Valls took up his work after
a career as a physician and psychiatrist. Early on he saw religion,
medicine and psychiatry as linked: religion would answer the questions
that psychiatry could not. "I was fascinated at the time," he said of
himself as a young man, "by those big questions, about life and death,
and what makes man happy."

In his dealings with the press, Dr.
Navarro-Valls acknowledges that he finds uses for his psychiatric
training. But he struggles with the question of whether to follow the
suggestion that the church should "use the media."

"I hate that formulation," he said.

He sees his work as being essentially
about "giving access to the process of decision-making - not just
distributing pieces of paper, but in terms of explaining why."

A medical doctor and professor of
psychiatry at the universities of Barcelona and Granada in his native
Spain, Dr. Navarro-Valls had published freelance articles for Spanish
publications when in 1977 he was asked to cover the eastern
Mediterranean for the Spanish daily ABC. He worked as a journalist
until 1983, and just as he had decided to return to medicine, he
received an invitation to lunch at the Vatican.

It seems that Pope John Paul, then five
years into his papacy, had heard praise of him from a number of people
- some belonging to the secretive Catholic men's society Opus Dei,
which the doctor had joined in his early 20's. Several months later,
the pope invited Dr. Navarro-Valls to overhaul the Vatican press
service.

He is not shy about his own prowess. The
example that pleases him most occurred at a 1994 United Nations
conference in Cairo on population and development. He was a delegate,
and the Vatican succeeded, thanks in part to a curious alliance with
Muslim delegations, in introducing more restrictive language on
abortion in the final declaration.

Dr. Navarro-Valls waved a copy of an
unclassified cable relating to that conference - a message to the State
Department from President Bill Clinton's ambassador to the Holy See,
Raymond L. Flynn. It described the irritation of some delegates over
perceived Vatican obstructionism and manipulation, but added that the
"skill and tenacity" of the Vatican's diplomats "and the public affairs
virtuosity of its chief spokesman - the Spaniard Joaquín
Navarro-Valls, a close confidant of the pope - took many by surprise."

While working toward a medical degree in
Barcelona in the 1960's, Joaquín Navarro-Valls also got a degree
in communications, a field he came to from psychiatry.

"I began from the question that arises in
psychiatry of how the media in general, including advertising,
influence human attitudes, both for better and for worse," he said. In
1970, his first book, "Manipulation in Advertising," appeared; three
others have followed, on the media, education and the family.

He traveled widely, attending seminars at
Harvard, including some on international politics by Henry A.
Kissinger. Talking of those years, he described a "pilgrimage" to the
London house where Freud had lived.

He is the second of five children; his
father was a Cartagena lawyer. A brother is a law professor in Madrid,
another is retired director of Heineken brewery's operations in Spain.
He was especially close to his eldest sibling and only sister, whose
death in her early 30's moved him deeply. He is still very much
involved with Opus Dei, in which he now holds a senior rank that
entails a commitment to celibacy.

"I took into account that the only way to
find God was within the framework of my profession," he said. "I don't
feel I was a Catholic physician. Instead, you are a Catholic who
happens to be a physician."

Early on, the pope, whom he sees daily,
assured him of access to the Vatican bureaucracy. "He opened doors,"
Dr. Navarro-Valls said. "Without his approach to the media, without the
mentality of the pope, change would have been impossible."

He recognizes the physical handicaps of
Pope John Paul, who turned 82 in May. Of his mental faculties, he said:
"From the point of view of memory, or the capacity of planning for the
future, those capacities are all absolutely intact. The biggest
strategic decisions - now, today - are being done by the pope."

He cites the decision after Sept. 11 to
convene an unusual gathering of dozens of religious leaders from Islam,
Judaism and other Christian denominations to reaffirm the principle
that God or religion never be invoked to justify violence. The meeting
took place in January in the Italian town of Assisi.

More recently, it was the pope's
decision, Dr. Navarro-Valls said, to accept the request of America's
cardinals to come to Rome for two days of discussions on the priest sex
abuse scandals.

Getting information from the Vatican can
still be laborious (though Dr. Navarro-Valls bridles at comparisons to
Kremlin secretiveness). But one example of revolutionary openness that
he introduced is the pope's practice on his many travels of spending
airplane time chatting with reporters in a kind of impromptu news
conference. John Paul has often used such occasions to make news. On
trips to Chile in 1987 and Cuba in 1998, he criticized the Pinochet and
Castro dictatorships; reporters had something substantial to file on
landing.

He is highly regarded by the Vatican
press corps, whose members appreciate what he has achieved given the
peculiarities imposed by Vatican constraints.

To this day, for example, the pope does
not hold news conferences or grant interviews. In part, Dr.
Navarro-Valls says, this is because so many hundreds of requests come
in from news organizations around the world that saying no to everyone
becomes the only effective solution.

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